Truth and Fiction

Not really a proper post - more a gem courtesy of Francis Alexander at The Chelsea Theatre today - but thoroughly worthwhile nonetheless.

"Theatre is a fiction concerned with the truth, while live art is a truth concerned with a fiction."

It makes an awful lot of sense and sounds great, so I like it a lot.

Review: Crocosmia, Battersea Arts Centre

Another week, another award-sweeping Edinburgh show at the Battersea Arts Centre. Where Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea proves an accomplished debut reliant on a strong, original concept well-applied but under-interrogated, Little Bulb Theatre’s Crocosmia is an accomplished debut lovingly crafted from microscopic details into something simultaneously heart-warming and heart-breaking.

At first glance the Brackenberg family seems a tightly-knit, quirky unit with the sort of chirpy romanticism usually reserved for Disney films. Quaintly resourceful and imaginative, the children – Finnley, Sophia and Freya – gnaw goldfish from carrots and learn to trim shaving-foam beards with razor-fingers, while their parents revisit Paris via an overhead projector. However, such idiosyncratic wholesomeness disintegrates once we learn that the Brackenberg children were orphaned in a car accident.

Accordingly, perspective slides and the children’s actions slip from kooky to coping mechanisms. The nauseating niceties of their parents become the mistaken whimsies of a child’s eye view muddled with faint, fond memories. Finnley, Sophia and Freya – played faithfully, delicately and fidgety by Dom Conway, Shamira Turner and Claire Beresford – seem caught between simultaneous pressures of maturity and regression. Indeed, there is something totemic about their taking on the parental characters; a notion furthered by their devouring of Battenberg cakes used to represent the choicest of family memories in the inspired Brackenberg Battenberg Puppet Theatre.

If that all sounds cutely sentimental and overly intellectual, Crocosmia balances itself out superbly through a constant sense of muted mania. With surrealist snippets such as ‘Freya Knows Best’ and the “Superfishy Underwater Orchestra”, director Alexander Scott has imbued the rhythm and energy of a television magazine show, accompanied by an eclectic soundtrack that manages to combine precision with seeming arbitrariness. Furthermore, the use of language of display is delightful. Sentences stumble and stagger clumsily creating such childish gems as; “Before you shave the beard, you must first have the beard.”

All in all, Crocosmia marks Little Bulb Theatre Company as a company to be watched with the beadiest of eyes. It is a petite, fragile and beautifully original piece of work that will set the sturdiest of chins aquiver – even as it raises a pursed smile. Utterly enchanting.

Love/Hate Relationship

I was recently asked, as part of an application form, to write 80 words on what I hate about theatre. Unexpectedly, I found myself having far more to cram in than with regards my loves. I thought I'd pop the text down here: partly, because I quite enjoyed writing it; partly, because somehow it serves as a useful introduction to everything that surrounds it on this blog and partly, because I'd be interested to see what others will come up with in response to the same question.

What do you hate about theatre?

I hate theatre that neglects form for content; theatre that places too much emphasis on cause and effect, believing audience reactions to be universal, mechanical and, therefore, predictable; theatre that assumes us blind to its cracks and shortcuts; theatre that wishes it were television; theatre that forgets that fiction only exists as created by the imagination and investment of the individual spectator. Essentially, I hate theatre that gives itself too much credit and treats its audience without due consideration or respect.

The Perfect Filling

For the lone theatre-goer, foyers are menacing halls of hubbub. You stand there, drink in hand, rooted to the spot, surrounded by conversing clumps. You are out of place, an isolated asocialite in the midst of a nightmarish drinks party. You flick through the programme and feign interest in the jazz; you make for corners and stare mindlessly at production stills. And then, mercy of mercies: the house opens.

I love little more than finding myself alone in a large auditorium before a show. It allows for a strange, gradual immersion, much like sitting in a bath while you run it. It allows the senses to adjust and the real world to fade to a distant, forgotten shadow. Just as a deep-sea diver must pause at regular intervals to avoid decompression sickness, so too must the audience member occasionally ease himself into a performance. Where walking into a bustling auditorium involves an immediate sensory shift – like the marked temperature change on entering a sauna – to sit through that warming process is to appreciate the magic of a space transformed. It is a remarkably relaxing experience.

An empty theatre is a void that exists in contented stability - all around you is an impervious stillness. For the majority of the day, the space has sat in idle equilibrium, mulling time, reminiscing. It need not wheeze into life but for the expectations of those gathered outside in the foyer. It hears them approaching and attempts to look lively. You enter into a sea of monochrome grey or red velvet; an insignificant blot on a constant colour scheme. The air feels heavy and deadened, any ripples through it absorbed into padding and disappearing entirely inconsequentially. Like walking through a church, your eyes drift upwards, but there is no click-clack of heel on stone. All is muted by carpet.

In the auditorium’s doorways the slightest of leaks appear, as droplets of humanity squeeze through. A handful of bodies speckle the seating, breaking its silence with whispered conversational nonentities. Gradually, the leak worsens and an irregular trickle appears in the aisles. The first suggestions of ritual emerge, as coats are shed and bags are tucked. There is a hesitancy about people. They stand at the end of rows, clutching ticket stubs to which they refer meticulously. “G19. This is us.” It’s said with a nervy confidence – almost a staking of territory.

A strange half-dance begins, as shambolic, broken conga-lines side-shuffle along rows. Now all around you is noise, soft and comforting. Through it pop phrases, snagging in your ears: “yesterday afternoon,” “Oxford Circus,” “Alan Bennett.” Then, to your immediate left, one rings louder. A simple “‘scuse me” interrupts the haze of sound. Looking to your left, you see a middle-aged couple – sideways on, of course – peering down with sycophantic smiles. You swivel to let them pass – a generous act repeated courteously, customarily deemed an inconvenience, but somehow empowering.

The trickle has become a stream, which will soon develop into patient clots around doorways. Rows of previously empty seats are now reduced to patches of bare material. Air kisses take place over their backs. Waves are thrown from one side of the room to another. The gentle babble has grown into a constant rhubarb, vibrant and warming. Then, you are joined to your right and joined a second time. Suddenly, you are in the middle of something. The words, “So this is dance is it?” tumble over your shoulder, quickly followed by the reply, “Well, dance-theatre.”

Suddenly, the room is a patchwork quilt of hair and balding crowns. Bodies lean around each other, mouths talk over one another. Rhubarb is clamour. You can no longer tell where one cluster ends and another begins. In front of you are chains of shoulders and behind, an amorphous plane of expressions. Clamour peaks at restless expectancy as doors are unhooked and the room is sealed. Waistcoated ushers melt unnoticed into corners. The lights dim and with them the noise descends to silence, broken only by the strains of another world.

Review: The Snow Queen, New Wimbledon Theatre Studio

Written for The Stage

With its sense of expedition and an array of fantastical characters, The Snow Queen makes perfect material for small-scale visual theatre. However, Finger in the Pie’s Lecoq-inspired production is little more than a series of set pieces strung clumsily together that subordinates storytelling to stage trickery.

A quaint metaphor for adolescence, Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale recounts Greta’s quest to rescue her best friend Kay from imprisonment at the Snow Queen’s arctic palace, encountering rivers, robbers and reindeers en route.

Aiming for a cutely continental production, director Alexander Parsonage commits a host of elementary errors. While his direction starts brightly and displays sporadic flashes of neat invention, too often it boils down to physical illustration of a clunky, over-simple script and dressing-up box literalism, whereby grandmothers wear bonnets and seductive horticulturalists floral dresses.

However, thanks to the rosy-cheeked energy and wide-eyed enthusiasm of Ana Mirtha Gutierrez as Gerta, the piece’s misgivings never result in tedium. Even as Greta’s travels reduces to a generic sense of journeying, Gutierrez is quirkily humorous and charmingly watchable throughout.

Without wanting to be cruel, The Snow Queen is an amateurish effort, altogether reliant on its leading actress and the charity of its audience.

Review: Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, BAC

Written for Culture Wars

Given the garlands and praise heaped upon 1927’s debut production, it’s difficult to approach Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea without expectations of brilliance. Thankfully, at its core is a partnership so snug and dexterous that it delivers with stylish aplomb. Susan Andrade’s deliciously wicked texts combine with Paul Barritt’s animation to create morsels as moreish as the darkest of chocolate truffles.

Essentially, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a series of pop-gothic vignettes, akin to Improbable’s Shockheaded Peter, telling of faceless tooth-fairies and gingerbread revolutionaries. The trick up its sleeve lies in the seamless interplay of live action and projection, whereby cartoon arrows pierce performers’ heads and sepia-toned lithographs spring to life. Served alongside Lillian Henley’s piano accompaniment, it resembles a silent film possessed and running amok in an empty auditorium.

Andrade and Esme Appleton perform with the utmost of dainty vulgarity – their carefully placed looks of mischief and plummy RP accents elevate the infantile cruelty of Andrade’s bittersweet poetry. They are at their best as orphaned twins so coldly courteous that butter is more likely to freeze over than melt. Having cremated au-pairs and cemented lodgers, the pair turn ominously to the audience in search of a replacement grandmother ripe for torment.

For all the aesthetic delights of Barritt’s delicately homespun animation and Andrade’s text, however, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea needs a touch more variety of content and interrogation of form to really dazzle. In relying on sensory titillation and wry humour alone, it can, at times, seem an extended cabaret act teetering dangerously close to smugness.

Nonetheless, with its slick accomplishment and gossamer gore, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea is a sublime antidote to sugary festive cheer.

Review: Peter Pan, Richmond Theatre

Written for The Stage

It’s panto by numbers down in Richmond, where Family First Entertainment’s Peter Pan ticks all the boxes without much individual flourish. While it’s well-balanced festive nutrition, it emerges somewhat flavourless, needing just that bit more sauce and seasoning.

If Bonnie Langford will ever grow out of the boy who wouldn’t grow up, she shows no signs of it here. Her perennial Peter Pan is a chipper young buck with more showbiz glitz than boyish mischief, as she mixes some fearless aerial tumbles with a flashy white smile. By comparison, Simon Callow’s diaphragm-busting Captain Hook makes something of a gentle nemesis, having to actively seek disapproval from his audience. Sterling work from Tony Rudd as Smee injects humour, life and - mercifully - pace into proceedings.

Peter Denyer and Fenton Gray’s adaptation is light on Barrie’s plot, with Hook submitting rather easily to his own plank and little exploration of the Darling family home. While there is plenty of (stocking) filler, 2008 gets off rather lightly. Aside from the rotting carcass of Jonathan Ross at Marooner’s Rock, the preference is for televisual references over topical ones.

This, however, provides the evening’s musical highlight as the pirates indulge in a five-part harmony of catchphrases, featuring Bruce Forsyth, Peggy Mitchell and a Dalek.

Terry Parsons’ pop-up book design elevates professionalism, but production values get in the way of spirit. Projecting Tinkerbell removes the magic of make-believe and an unnecessarily realistic crocodile loses its comic menace.

In lacking real character of its own, Richmond’s Peter Pan only flies with an abundance of good will.

Playing with, not by, the rules

In life, I am a stickler for rules. I have always struggled to break curfews, miss deadlines, lie to figures of authority, walk on the grass or commit adultery - primarily on account of never having married. I cannot stand the possibility of my being late for anything that matters. At the merest chance of stepping over a line of some sort, apologies tumble out of my mouth and I sweat volumes that could close the M25. Perhaps, as with many of my character traits, it has to do with being 5’6”. Perhaps, I just believe rules are there for a reason. Perhaps, I just leave the breaking of them down to others.

When it comes to performance, however, I turn anarchist, or, at least, the equivalent of a smoker lurking behind the bike-shed.

Just over a week ago, I went along to the BAC to catch Mind Out, the latest performance/theatre piece by Station House Opera. Mind Out attempts to break the connection between body and mind, whereby each performer’s actions must conform to the instructions of another’s mind: “You pour the milk”; “You stir the tea”; “You want to ask a question but think better of it.” Lyn Gardner described the result as “akin to watching a group of marionettes trying to exert their free will”. For me, the opposite was true – the performers seemed human in form but not in essence, devoid of free will and control. I was reminded of the emptiness of those children that underwent the intercision process in Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, separated from their daemons and utterly broken.

Over the hour and a half of Mind Out my interest almost entirely waned. Where I began pricked with interest and tickled by the apparent irrational and counter-intuitive dislocation of action and motivation, I found the overall event tiresome, draining and tedious. For me, Mind Out was crippled by its use of the rules it set itself. Put simply the game was one person commanding, another obliged to carry out that command. However, since the ‘game’ is not actually played out in the moment, the performance resembles an improv exercise set in stone by virtue of being scripted. A minor quibble is that the chain of command becomes murky. At first, it follows an obvious circle – A commands B, B commands C, etc – but this soon shifts wordlessly, such that any rule seems to disintegrate.

My main problem, however, is that for the majority of the time Mind Out plays by the rule rather than with the rule. In doing so, it becomes somewhat monotone; a limited sphere of possibility whereby peaks and troughs barely register on the Richter Scale. It is little more than a series of actions, often knowingly comic in themselves, performed by stick-men and women. Only rarely does the rule set actually cause challenges or twist itself in knots. The deconstructed making of a cup of tea, shared and split between five performers proves difficult and, as such interesting. When Julian Maynard Smith commands an absent performer around the space, the same rules allow for distortion and, crucially, difference.

In sport, rules exist to set boundaries. They exist to be played by in order that the game is fair, that both sides are on the same pitch and page, that all is equal. However, it is worth noticing that the papers pick up on the rules breaks – the dives, the dissent and the disputes. As much as moments of brilliance within the rules, sport’s drama rests in its human and ethical controversies. Theatre, given that its concern rests with aesthetics as well as ethics, need not concern itself with equality. It can and, indeed, ought to tip the balance and break the rules. Theatre must rely on opposition, on the drama of struggle and the spark of solution, by foul means or fair. It is in the rule-breaks or clever reinterpretation of the rules that theatre can vary its rhythm. Moreover, given that its rules are self-created and self-imposed, theatre can be totally free to break those rules. A piece owns its own rule system and can do with it what it will.

Returning, then, to Mind Out – I needed to see ambiguous commands that left interpretation down to the performer. I needed to see commands that could not be followed. I needed to see a series of commands that got in the way of each other, clashing and conflicting – the one preventing the fulfillment of the other. I needed to see performers commanded into dangerous situations, whereby dissent and refusal was the only possible reaction. I needed to see rebellion and risk, break downs and break ups, military coups and constitutional reform.

Not just four people eating the same biscuit between them.

Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Review: Brilliant, Lyric Hammersmith Studio

Written for Culture Wars

Brilliant is to children’s theatre what Picasso and Pollock are to visual art. Dispensing with the usual rules of narrative, character and interaction, Fevered Sleep has created something altogether more responsive and gloriously freeform. It borders on live art; almost post-dramatic theatre for pre-schoolers. If that sounds overly highbrow, the work itself is not, since the shift in form registers neatly with its young audience, delighting the senses and sparking the synapses.

The final part of Fevered Sleep’s trilogy that delves beyond everyday routines to the magic therein, Brilliant hones in on bedtime or, more precisely, on the threshold between waking and dreaming. Having bid goodnight to the universe and all it contains, performer Laura Cubitt settles down to bed with her toy stag and slips into sleep. Behind curtains that open and close like heavy eyelids, Cubitt emerges into a dream-world of light that plays around the space.

What follows is almost a pas de deux between performer and light, whereby the interplay of performer’s body and intangible beams is fascinatingly otherworldly. Cubitt pops through luminous membranes into shady hollows and dances softly in radiant droplets in front of the glow of an enormous moon.

As the sturdiness of waking reality gives way to a dreamy fluidity, the scene’s logic blurs with it and Cubitt takes on elements of a bemused Alice in a shimmering Wonderland. As switches and mirrorballs plop from above, her dream becomes a causeway of cause and effect, each switch responsible for a stream of light, or a maze of reflection and refraction.

Yet all of this is temporary and fleeting, closed off and shut down by the curtains that draw her back into bed with a bump.

Director David Harradine displays a careful layering within the piece, which functions simultaneously as titillating light-show and physical poetry. With a soft score from double bassist David Leahy that captures the rippling fragility of the dream portrayed, Brilliant proves an aptly named exploration that drifts between dozy calm and ticklish dream.

Review: The Time of Your Life, Finborough Theatre

Written for The Stage

Beginning with a burp and proceeding with equal delicacy, Max Lewendel’s tedious production saps the metaphor and melancholy out of William Saroyan’s Pulitzer-winning portrait of the Great Depression.

Saroyan’s play is more observation than action, sketching the layabouts, prostitutes and directionless masses propped up in a San Francisco dive-bar, as they search for meaning and dream of love. Amongst them are Joe (Alistair Cumming), an unshaven, champagne-swilling hangover of the Roaring Twenties, and Kitty Duval (Maeve Malley-Ryan), an escort with jaded ambitions in burlesque.

By placing us within Nick’s bar, seating audience members at tables within the scene, designer Christopher Hone immerses us in the location. However, Lewendel struggles to reconcile production with design. Stagnant blocking undermines the traverse formation and much of the acting is over-pitched. Moreover, the audience’s place in the scene is confused – alternately acknowledged and ignored.

Lewendel’s production is crippled by its lack of nuance in performance. Several characters are reduced to stock for cheap laughs and dialogue is delivered with Hollywood iconicity. Other than Brett Finlay (Nick) and Payman Jaberi (The Arab), the best one can say of the cast is that it is the largest to have squeezed onto the Finborough’s stage.

Icarus Theatre Collective has served up a sparkling vintage gone absolutely flat.

Imagine Form as Content

In her 2007 review of Presumption, currently playing at The Southwark Playhouse, Lyn Gardner picked up on the perfect marriage of its form and content. Third Angel's exploration of the humdrums of a loving relationship, after the passion and peacock feathers have settled, is repeatedly interrupted by the absence of necessary items of set. The piece almost questions whether it should or can proceed and battles through, just as its characters question their own relationship’s worth. As Beth and Tom's situation unfolds slowly and laboriously, so too does their shared living-room. The form serves as a fitting metaphor for the content, such that what is being presented cannot be separated from the very act of presentation itself.

On seeing Imagine This at the New London Theatre on Monday night, I couldn't help but agree with Michael Billington's assessment that the two were entirely at odds. Content, it seemed, had been well and truly battered into shape, much to the detriment of both elements. As a musical, Imagine This is overburdened by its subject, even as its subject is undermined precisely by its being a musical. As Billington says: "the romantic sentiment and uplift inherent in the musical sit uneasily with a story of not just heroic resistance but starvation, suffering and the death of more than 100,000 Polish Jews."

If fiction is to concern itself with the realities and atrocities of war, it must do so by implication. Either it must focus on the scale while implying each life lost to be a tragedy in and of itself, or else, it must do the reverse: use individual tragedy to point towards the magnitude. To lay focus on both seems impossible. By way of example, Saving Private Ryan’s first scene attempts the former while Life Is Beautiful and The Pianist achieve the opposite. If theatre, film or literature about war relies on mere facts and figures it becomes history. Instead, it must assume its audience already know or understand such things and use them to its advantage.

Theatre, as Imagine This proves so convincingly, cannot compete with film for scale. The stage is too small: it can no more fit an army than it can include a fight to the death. Instead, we must contend with ten pike-wielding Nazi uniforms standing in for the mass rallies of Nuremberg or a clump of bedraggled Jews and a handcart representing the entirety of relocation into the ghettos. Theatre’s hand is forced – it must rely on the individual story to reach the overall picture. War must provide the setting and not the story. It must intrude into and affect the narrative, but it cannot itself be the narrative. We glimpse it momentarily in the rubble and in the rations, in a death but not in constant death, and also as a filter through which we can see everything in between: from cups of tea to bedtime stories.

However, as a form the musical struggles to cope with this. It cannot rely on the minutiae, whether material or emotional, that anchors a story to reality and truth. Instead, musicals tend to magnify. They make stories grander, glossier and more global at the expense of the personal. They prefer spectacle. Musicals are inhabited by archetypes, rather than individuals – their characters are more recognisable than they are real. While Joseph or Guys and Dolls might survive its form, Imagine This feels like misrepresentation of each individual caught up in the history behind it.

(As I’ve been writing this, Imogen Russell Williams has posted a similar blog on warfare in theatre at Guardian Unlimited: here.)

But, I digress. Over the past half-century, theatre has played with form more than ever before. The experimentation that has come from treating theatre as a question posed, rather than a set of conventions, has grown exponentially. In asking, “What can theatre possibly be? What can we get away with? How do we break this?”, theatre has carved out the possibility of being anything it wants. We can clump Punchdrunk and the Globe, Forced Entertainment and Peter Hall, Shunt and A Chorus Line together in the same category. As such, it has become unacceptable merely to tolerate conventions and, in doing so, subordinate form to content.

Form must be equal to content, because form is content. Like a pair of glasses, it is the means by which we see everything onstage and, at the same time, it is always within our field of vision. It’s the reason Third Angel write: “We will make what interests us in whatever format is appropriate, rather than being tied to one distinct art form.” It’s the reason that Forced Entertainment, Goat Island, the Wooster Group and many others boast such a diverse canon of work. It’s also the reason why, having seen Punchdrunk’s Faust, I got so bored during The Masque of the Red Death.

To assume form is to neglect content and the sooner that theatre across the board realises it, the better.

Review: Daedalus & Icarus, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars


If Mungu Theatre Company’s chirpy retelling of Greek mythology is anything to go by, Iranian theatre is in good health. Playing in the Barbican Pit as part of the Iran: New Voices season, their Daedalus and Icarus is a fittingly inventive reimagination of Ovid’s epic poem that lies somewhere between Beckett and Hannah-Barbera.

Writer-director Homayun Ghanizadeh casts the aviators as wacky Wright Brothers, complete with goggles and ear-flaps, and gives a touch of Odd Couple dynamics in drawing on the oppositions between father and son to highlight the chasm between playful child and responsible adult. Nodding to clowning, but nearer to the goofiness of a live action cartoon, performers Javad Namaki and Hamidreza Naeimi Jegarlouei whizz and whir around the stage hammering on metal and baring blow torches. As they work noisily, Icarus is a bundle of distraction constantly wrist-slapped by his father’s piercing whistles, which enforce a rigid schedule. “There three types of people in the world,” Daedalus scolds - the third is always “those that blow whistles.”

Like the characters, Mungu’s production takes a long while to get off the ground, but having finally taken off, it soars. The metal structures form a swinging cockpit-like contraption, equipped with an industrial fan and four black-clad stagehands, and the two seem to genuinely take flight. They corkscrew, loop-the-loop and burst through shaving foam snowstorms in front of you. Suddenly, there is an electric fascination, edging on danger, and the journey becomes a whole narrative in and of itself, twisting and turning through the skies.

However, Ghanizadeh’s production struggles to wrap up the myth’s main function. Rather than melting the wax of wings by flying to near the sun, here Icarus turns joyrider once Daedalus has parachuted. While it works to modernize the story, the theatre of the moment falls out in comparison to the jubilant freewheeling of the flight. It all feels slightly anti-climactic.

Daedalus and Icarus delivers physical invention, witty and playful, well balanced by a tightly wound script (delivered in Persian with English surtitles). It might crash-land towards the end, but the flight itself is theatre at first class.

Review: You, Me, Bum Bum Train, Cordy House

Written for WhatsOnStage.com

In the heart of Shoreditch is a theatrical experience sure to leave you Dazed and Confused. For the twenty minutes of You, Me, Bum Bum Train, life whizzes towards you, towers over you and nestles momentarily in your periphery vision before disappearing. Like a cinematic dream sequence or drug trip filmed in POV, nothing is quite within your grasp or without distortion. The result is an exhilarating headspin of dizzying escapism.

Charged with rum and karoke, you are seated in a rickety wheelchair before being hurtled through a series of interactive situations – from bobsleigh runs to boxing rings – populated by a cast of seventy performers.

Crucially, everything is about you. The Bum Bum Train takes you to places where everybody not only knows your name, but cheers it to the rafters. Sick children ask for your autograph; admirers take your arm; paparazzi capture your image. This is a carousel of fantasies that treats you to a flavour of heroism and, then, before you can grow accustomed to it, whisks you off elsewhere.

It does, however, leave you in each moment just long enough to demand a real response. Do you throw a punch? Or pose for the cameras? What comes out of your mouth when asked to translate into Swahili? At such velocities, impulse and reflex become your masters. Your actions are as genuine as they are unthinking and, accordingly, consistently take you by surprise.

Yet there also lurks something altogether darker. In the midst of all this frenetic fun, regular suggestions that you might be ill barely register. At times, you are frisked, manhandled and mollycoddled. Even as you bask in your newfound celebrity, it leaves you questioning which fiction to believe.

While You, Me, Bum Bum Train is breathlessly exciting, there are flaws. Its brevity makes £15 seem steep. The stock situations portrayed means content falls short of form in terms of invention and more could be done to involve all the senses. Most damaging, however, is the slightest of suspicions that the joke might just be on you.

Nonetheless, as it treats you the experiences of someone else’s lifetime, You, Me, Bum Bum Train is a rollercoaster as entertaining as it is eye-popping.

Review: Presumption, Southwark Playhouse

Written for Culture Wars

Love is in the air at the Southwark Playhouse – only not the sort of love that takes your breath away. Rather the sort that, like breathing itself, has become a staple function of existence. With a doting attention to mundane minutiae, Third Angel celebrate a love seldom seen on stage or screen and, in doing so, sway any aspirations from perfection to contented, humdrum humanity.

Presumption explores a relationship, seven-years in, once the passion and peacock feathers have settled. Beth and Tom have both independently realised that things have changed. The question is whether for better or worse. Sure, they have become knotted together, with shared possessions and comfortable silences, but that knot seems inextricable, surrounded by hypothetical affairs and possible alternatives.

The strength of the piece lies in Third Angel’s refusal to paint in black and white. As such, Presumption is at once feel-good and melancholy; the union within both robust and frail. Beth and Tom’s relationship is a seismograph of constant tremors without earthquakes or a field of molehills ready to be made mountainous. Through them Third Angel ask, “Is this all there is” whilst simultaneously suggesting that a cup of tea and a welcoming kiss are all anyone could ever need.

Yet, it’s also extremely well-considered, whereby form and content are perfectly entwined. Throughout the piece performers Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe construct a clutter-filled living-room according to the markings on a bare stage. As they build it together, the effort, teamwork and compromise that the relationship has required becomes touchingly clear. Everything has its proper place; everything has significance and history. Accordingly, Presumption gets right underneath the notion of your entire world falling apart.

Ellinson and Thorpe perform with dazzling openness – utterly convincing as characters yet also allowing something of themselves to slip through. Whether playing with finely-tuned details, such as their shared head-tilts, or the broad comedy of struggling under furniture, they remain engaging, empathetic and extremely likeable.

A thought-provoking, tender and, at times, tragic look at normality, Presumption will leave you longing to get home for all the right reasons. It is a warm bath, run by another – no candles, no rose petals – but just right nonetheless.

Just Dandy

Like Maxie Szalwinska, I spent Saturday afternoon at The Riverside indulging in a spot of Peachy Coochy, a mischievous event led by the impish David Gale. Though I was aware of its monthly existence at Toynbee Studios, this was my first experience of the form. It wasn’t entirely as I had expected it to be, but nonetheless, I found it thoroughly enjoyable and thought-provoking.

Peachy Coochy derives from a Japanese practice (pecha kucha) of limiting architectural design pitches to a strict form. Each presenter must work under the constraint of having precisely twenty slides, each of which appears for only twenty seconds, to give a presentation lasting six minutes and forty seconds. No more, no less; endless possibility.

What I had expected was a more immediately responsive form, whereby the presenter has not seen the images and must find inspiration from them to give twenty seconds of unplanned insight. In such a form, the struggle to articulate and the rigour of expiring time would push failure to the forefront and enforce genuine liveness.

What surprised me was how unwilling many of the artists were to submit to the whims of passing time. Gary Winters of Lone Twin counted out the seconds. Tim Etchells took a stopwatch with him onto stage. Rotazaza’s Ant Hampton left ample space, by creating a minimal text to fit comfortably into each twenty second demarcation. It seemed that no one wanted to play with vulnerability, to empower chance and risk failure.

That said, had my expectations been the case, the event would have strong similarities to a game-show. While this adds risk, it also becomes a great leveller, with little room for possible interpretation and play with the form. After a while, game-shows begin to blur into one – the difference between individual editions is eradicated. The individual attempt gets lost in the repeated framework. Regardless of questions, players and outcomes, The Weakest Link boils down to Anne Robinson swivelling on a pedestal. Watch too much Blankety Blank and each edition reduces to the a row of famous faces cracking funnies. Too much emphasis on the form and the liveness becomes irrelevant through a process of abstraction.

It was the radical differences between presentations – the stamping of personality onto the formal constraints – that captured me on Saturday. It enabled Gary Winter to measure out the time with a metronomic style and Lois Keidan to cram it full at breakneck pace. It allowed Ursula Martinez to sway towards stand-up and Adrian Heathfield to swing into intellectualism. It allowed wispy artiness and concrete polemic; stillness and movement; silliness, sentiment and sense.

But, Peachy Coochy also allows for that failure, for the dislocation of pictures and words, for one person to take control of each element, for a presentation about this presentation with photos of itself and its audience. Because, therein is the joy of Peachy Coochy – it is whatever you want it to be.

Exeunt Into Reality

At one o’clock on Monday morning, as I turned onto my road, there was a middle-aged man, wrapped up and tracksuited, running. An unusual sight for that time of night, made all the more interesting in its echoes of The Long Road, which I had seen a week before at the Soho Theatre. In Shelagh Stevenson’s play, the father talks of endlessly jogging to escape the pain of his son’s murder. On my road, seeing this nocturnal runner, an entire fiction presented itself. Like Kafka’s short on two men running past, an array of questions sprung to mind. From what was he running? Why at this time? What was so repelling at home?

I love those moments in real life that seem to step off the stage and into reality. Here, for a second, parallel possibilities co-exist, both equally fictitious. Multiplicity reigns supreme and characters linger on long after the curtain to mingle amongst the audience in the bar and beyond. How many Hamlets are wistfully wondering around London at this moment?

A while back, on the Jubilee Line platform at Baker Street station, I saw a man in a gorilla costume. I could not but think of Claire Marshall similarly suited in Bloody Mess. It goes to show that anything can belong onstage, because, no matter how obscure or theatrical, it doubtless exists in real life.

Further along the platform, appropriately, was a poster that quoted David Lynch: “Life can be complicated so art should be allowed to be complicated too.”

Review: Footsbarn's Midsummer Night's Dream, Victoria Park

Written for Culture Wars

So otherworldly is Footsbarn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream, that it conjures thoughts of another dimension altogether. Two dimensions to be precise, for it has all the qualities of a BBC animated adaptation aimed at schools: low-tech, low-brow and lowly. Larger than life yet utterly without boldness, theirs is a homespun Dream simply told; its eye firmly fixed upon the groundlings. In stubbornly refusing to engage intellect or emotions, it proves an evening to surpass “the bounds of maidens’ patience.”

Footsbarn are a travelling theatre company approaching forty years of madcap, populist performance and not seen on these shores in a quarter century. Accordingly, for all the shortcomings of the drama itself, there is a quaint charm at play. Underneath their masks, Footsbarn’s players become intriguing specimens, a throwback to simple, roaming antiquity. They live entirely for performance. While their big-top, erected in a clearing in Victoria Park, promises a dark, eerie magic, Footsbarn exude warmth, generosity and a fondness for the people of the world.

Sadly, all the goodness of spirit in the world cannot elevate their makeshift Midsummer Night’s Dream, which increasingly grates as it fades from mirth to monotony. Footsbarn display little faith in the play itself, overburdening it to breaking point with convoluted additions, slapstick clowning routines and bizarre character choices.

Lysander and Demitrius (Paddy Hayter and Vincent Gracieux) are so aged that they more closely resemble a pair of Richard IIIs than young lovers. As such, their joint pursuit of Hermia (a sweet Caroline Piette) and Helena (Muriel Piquart) takes on a perturbing quality of unwanted attention. As Titania, Akemi Yamauchi moves with an airy elegance but is utterly incomprehensible when tackling the text, while Mas Soegeng’s Puck is a force of aggravation, as he squeals pig-like throughout.

The mechanicals fair little better. Overplayed and under-thought, they finally produce a pageant-like Pyrramus and Thisbe of surprising sophistication but little laughter. It is left to the delightful Piquart, a marvellous clown possessed of remarkable stillness, to garner any form of original comedy as she springs into Helena’s broad emotional extremes.

Footsbarn’s Dream might serve as an easy introduction for the uninitiated, but in harking back to a time before directorial vision and literary interpretation it offers little more than a glimpse of curious antiquity.

One of life's brighter days

I have an interview with Tim Etchells in The Stage this week. Haven't seen it yet, but when I do I'll post it up here - should be later today. Might even get round to posting some thoughts on Spectacular, which I saw last Thursday at the Riverside, by the weekend.
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Exploring Existence

Forced Entertainment’s previous production The World in Pictures – a brisk and brusque retelling of history in its entirety – glosses over the major events of the past few decades in a rattle of et ceteras and blah, blah, blahs. “This stuff,” explains Terry O’Connor to the audience, “is stuff that you know anyway. Since you all lived through it, we can afford to go quickly.”

It is an intriguing but loving dismissal of the present from the Sheffield-based collective, who for almost 25 years have remained utterly fixated by the messy complexities of contemporary existence. Under the artistic direction of Tim Etchells the company have always aimed to dissect the act of living as it is right here, right now, with all its postmodern and existential trappings. Neat facts and tidy narratives simply don’t tell the whole story.

“When you go twenty-four, twenty-five years, as we have done,” says Etchells, “it becomes clear that you’re circling various topics and chasing things. You do it one way and then you go back a few years later and do it another way. Nothing’s final, is it?”

No surprises, then, that their new show Spectacular, a two-hander around death that receives its UK premiere recently at the Warwick Arts Centre, resuscitates some recurring motifs. Followers of the company will recognize the skeleton costume and enacted deaths, both of which have cropped up intermittently since 1986. “In some ways it’s a distillation or pushing on of a set of things that have been in the work for some time. I’m not obsessive that things are brand new.”

Despite this assertion, Forced Entertainment has never been content to settle for safe regurgitation of endlessly similar products. In treating theatre as a question posed, they have remained perched on the form’s edges, picking at its seams and pushing its limits.

Formed in 1984 by a group of Exeter University graduates, the experimental outfit now comprises of a core of six artists – Robin Arthur, Ricard Lowdon, Claire Marshall, Cathy Naden, Terry O’Connor and Etchells. In two and a half decades, the group have created an expansive and multifarious canon of over 50 projects, spanning theatre, visual art, film, text and digital media.

Throughout the eighties, the company’s work was characterised by a desperate, riotous freneticism, playing on the conflict between Hollywood adrenaline and the desolation of Thatcher’s Britain. Influences such as Impact Theatre and Pina Bausch combined as minimalist choreography gave way to ragged, visceral scores populated with kidnappings, cowboys and Elvis impersonators.

“Maybe at one point we were governed by this idea that a show ought to be X, Y and Z,” Etchells admits, “It ought to have some running around, it ought to have some music – and that was what we did. Over the years, that sense of what a show might be has loosened. We became more interested in liveness and in contact with the audience, flirting with the possibilities of having a hundred, two hundred or three hundred people sat watching.”

Out of the relative comfort of the nineties grew a more minimal style of work. Speak Bitterness, first performed in 1994, consisted of a row of seven suited performers continuously confessing sins over six hours, from eating the last biscuit, to forgery and fraud, to genocide.

“Everyone was used to us putting on mad costumes and wrecking everything about the stage, covered in beer – that was normal. When we came out and sat down to chat, that was surprising, because nobody really anticipated the work would go in that direction.”

Since then, their performances have often explored the failure of theatre itself. First Night presented an am-dram vaudevillian disaster of fixed smiles and missed cues, while 2005’s Bloody Mess collapsed inwards under clashing genres and a menagerie of theatrical personas – actresses, clowns, roadies and a woman in a gorilla suit – wrestling for centre stage status.

Within all this lurks a dark, ambiguous comedy. “There’s always been an absurd, playful edge to the work, even when it’s trying to be serious. I think our influences or reference points are half from art and theatre and half from popular entertainment – from Tommy Cooper or Morecombe and Wise, from stand-up or amateur dramatics. We always love to mix things up.”

With their hunger for experimentation and reinvention, Forced Entertainment has become staple fare in academic circles.

In 1999, the company received funding for the development of educational resources, which Etchells feels has added accessibility to the work. However, through their risky interrogation of form, the company remain well beyond mainstream popularity.

“Britain still seems very closed in comparison to mainland Europe. By persistence we’ve got a place that we’re allowed to occupy, but it still feels slightly grudging – not in terms of funding, but in a general sense of the cultural air. If you want to do anything interesting, you have to make space for it yourselves.”

Having already attempted to rewrite history and reshape geography, to confess the world’s sins, ask all its questions and tell all its stories, once cannot help but wonder the sort of space they’ll need. As Etchells has said in the past: “The stage is too small; it isn’t the whole world.”

Review: The Long Road, Soho Theatre

Written for WhatsOnStage.com

Newspapers trot out the facts and figures of knife crime on a seemingly daily basis. What little we see of the people affected by such momentary murders reduces to ill-fitting labels and quotations of despair. Shelagh Stephenson’s The Long Road serves a desperate and poignant reminder that no one is just another statistic; that, while the media is quick to forget, the damage caused stretches far beyond the life lost.

In the aftermath of 18 year-old Danny’s death, his family are in turmoil: a chorus of grief scavenging for meaning. While his father John (Michael Elwyn) turns to the numbness of incessant jogging and whiskey, his mother Mary (Denise Black) seeks some unknown comfort in contacting his killer, Emma Price (Michelle Tate). Their imprisonment is one of confused sorrow, filled with a muddle of retaliation, retribution and small acts of repair.

Stephenson’s script is a deft work elevated by its first-rate cast into something simple, honest and forcefully profound. Her timely use of vulnerable humour takes the edge off its grand statements of grief, grounding every character with a soft pathos. While the text’s directness occasionally tips into an outside perspective, for the most part it is affecting and penetrating.

Director Esther Baker cleverly avoids navel-gazing, rattling through the text at breakneck speed with diligent sensitivity to rhythm. In playing in traverse, she sets a chasm between burdened family and troubled killer, the crossing of which seems both brave and territorially invasive.

Moreover, she coaxes fine performances from a tremendous cast. Black is utterly captivating in her private turbulence, caught in a rational awareness of irrational emotions. Michelle Tate constructs a fortress of quick-fire words around a touching vulnerability and, as Danny’s older brother, Steven Webb is a master of the tear-stained smile; cracking jokes even as he gulps down a lump in the throat.

Powerful, urgent and sincere, The Long Road is a seldom heard voice of vital humanity.

Review: Rank, Tricycle Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

With the world teetering towards debt-ridden recession, Robert Massey's Rank serves a light-hearted reprimand for excessive financial risk. Standing in for big-time bankers is a rag-bag collection of small-town gamblers and gangsters tangled together in a tightly-wound knot of arrears and affairs. While dryly amusing, Massey’s double-crossing plot struggles in the unwinding, abandoning originality in favour of limp familiarity.

On top of overdue mortgage and credit card instalments, cabbie Carl Conway has racked up several grand's worth of gambling debts with local Irish Mafioso, Jack Farrell. Served with a stern warning from Farrell’s dopey son Fred, Conway enlists the help of colleagues – his father-in-law George Kelly and scruffy lothario ‘Two in the Bush’ – in repaying the debt. With a combination of blind luck and bluff, they aim to turn Conway’s hapless situation around.

There are some exceptional performances within. As Carl, Alan King is a wonderfully overgrown child, as down in the mouth as he is on his luck. His first scene with Bryan Murray, who plays Jack with rigid menace, fizzes with comic chemistry. John Lynn is hilarious as ‘Two in the Bush’, gently lilting his way through rambling monologues and precarious situations with Fred Farrell, with whose wife he has recently slept.

Though Massey’s script is full of deliciously bleak witticisms, waxing lyrical on phone sex lines and Aldi, it is ultimately contained by its own linearity. His delicate build of tension in the first half is entirely undermined by the predictability of the outcome. The problem is that theatre played this straight cannot match the grand twists and connections possible in a multi-layered, quick-cut film.

Despite snappy direction and sharpshooting humour, Fishamble’s production ultimately succumbs to ambitions too lofty. Rank is more writers’ block than Lock, Stock.

Review: Othello, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Culture Wars

In relocating Othello to the blood-red dinge of a run-down Northern pub, Frantic Assembly have transformed it from personal to social tragedy. Here, culpability for the final body-strewn pool table lies not with the individual whims of Iago, but rather the culture of respect in which he is immersed. All is aggression and “reputation, reputation, reputation” in an intelligent and thrilling indictment of machismo malignity.

While, in whittling the play into a brisk two hours, directors Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett can only nod towards the gradual process of its deception, there is plenty of interpretation to be found in visual details. In The Cypress pub, under the luminescent flicker of a slot machine, men transform into beasts as drink “steals away their brains”. They take pool cues and bottles as swords and daggers, swaggering and aggravating in a battlefield of leisure.

In fact, it is surprising how well the location befits the text. Race remains a constant presence without being bludgeoned into place and the local gang preserves the hierarchy and responsive violence of Shakespeare’s military setting. If anything there is added brutality, without pillows and noble swordsmanship to soften the blows.

What it loses is a sense of tragic downfall, as Jimmy Akingbola’s Othello is only great when viewed from within the culture under attack. He is a picture of hostile masculinity elevated from a pack of dopey shellsuited henchmen, too easily coaxed into irrational suspicion. That Charles Aitken’s Iago is a teenager out of his depth and, increasingly, out of control, points the finger of blame back on Othello himself and the respect he demands. He seems to play at the only adulthood he sees reflected around him.

Amidst the broad, bold adaptation are some deftly subtle touches. Brown ale is spat across the stage, while bottles of WKD are readily ingested. In a nod to his “motiveless malignity”, Iago wears a Nike T-shirt emblazoned with the logo: ‘Just Do It’. Aurally, however, Frantic Assembly miss the target – much of the dialogue flattens to a grating monotone, delivered with the push of aggressive syllables and generic Northern dialects – and just occasionally the dance becomes overly smooth and polished, softening its vicious gall.

However, this is bare-knuckle Shakespeare that you can’t afford to take your eyes off for a second.

Warning: Smoking can seriously damage your fiction

I have two habits: smoking and theatre-going. Like a persistent framing device, a hasty cigarette will immediately precede and follow any performance I attend. Indeed, I spend at least half of a twenty minute interval weighing up the practical and ethical considerations of squeezing in a second. And I know I’m not the only one.

The thing is that the two inevitably conflict. The smoking habit consists of a ticking necessity, a gradually increasing itch that must be scratched. Most performances, having a certain fixed duration, prove an obstacle to satisfying that craving. Sadly, as with a long-haul flight, to step outside of a performance is to bid a world farewell.

However, in the murky depths of a good production, cravings simply don’t enter the picture. To be so wrapped up in a performance that your body forgets its own semblance of imbalance is a wonderful thing. It is to leave your physical body behind, float to the roof of the auditorium and exist as only your senses, imagination and thoughts. It is investment to the extent of forgetting yourself.

Of course, such investment is a greasy and fragile thing, readily broken by the tiniest of intrusions; a sniffle here, a rustle there. One sure-fire way in which to snap through it, however, is to put a cigarette onstage.

Yet a cigarette smoked on screen will not have the same effect. The other week, I watched Brian Cox and Shaun Parks work their way through at least a packet in the television adaptation of Blue/Orange without once becoming distracted by it. The same is true of Marlon Brando. Or Sharon Stone. Or Pinocchio.

But two hours into A Disappearing Number, when Paul Bhattacharajee lit up as Aninda Rao on the banks of the Cooum river near Chennai, I was instantly back in the Barbican. For me, the mere sight of a cigarette was enough to trigger a relapse into reality. Perhaps it’s because of the firm conflict itself; there’s no SkyPlus pause button to turn to for a brief break. Or perhaps it’s something more.

At the start of A Disappearing Number, Complicité go to great lengths to highlight the fictitious: no one is on the other end of this phone, this door leads nowhere in particular, etc. The only real thing, they point out, is the maths. But the cigarette and the response it triggers are equally real, existent in front of you.

The performance goes on, with mathematical sleight of hand, to coax an entire audience of individuals into thinking of the number seven in unison. The same magic happens with the cigarette. Gradually, invisible wisps of tobacco smoke begin to drift through the auditorium, curling into noses and brains. The same trick is repeated, though this time remains unflagged, as swathes of audience members prick up on nicotine alert. I deeply hope it was a conscious decision, perhaps signalling the nearing of the end through unspoken physical response.

Theatre, as Alan Read and many others have pointed out, happens in the air between performers and audience. That air moves, vibrates, contains waves of light, jets of breath and pathways of smoke. Onstage smoking is real in a way that onscreen, it can never be. It doesn’t only remind the brain, it reacts with the body. It makes you remember yourself.

Again, on Saturday, watching Frantic Assembly’s Othello, a performer smokes. He is in the middle of a dance, half period, half modern. The glow of the cigarette moves about the stage: a firefly in the midst of revels. I can’t take my eyes of it. Will someone get caught with a sharp burn? What happens if it drops to the carpet? Surely that’s a hindrance to the dancer’s fitness? There is suddenly an element, however small, of danger, a heightened sense of risk, a precarious skill on show.

Ever since Mel Smith leaned out of a Scottish window, cigar in hand, vowing to defy the smoking ban, there has been another thought at play. A cigarette onstage must be “artistically justifiable”. This affects the smoker and the non-smoker alike. A cigarette onstage is no longer an arbitrary choice; it must have dramaturgical significance. It must be more than just a cigarette. As such, it cannot be overlooked for other goings on; it needs, nay, craves, being puzzled – a ticking challenge to the audience member that must be answered.

Unless it’s herbal, in which case its very fakeness proves more fatal.

With all this, there can be no such thing as the innocent cigarette onstage. It is the glowing destroyer of fictions and the diverter of attentions.

Let heaven see the pranks...

With the nation moving from barracking to Baracking and the uproar of the Ross/Brand Sachs scandal seemingly forgotten, it seems time to scrutinize the ethics and aesthetics of the prank call in performance. (Actually, it seems rather late but I've been putting this off for a while.)

To summarize, Ross and Brand left a series of slightly obscene, largely unamusing and hugely puerile messages on actor Andrew Sachs’ answering machine. The British public, stirred up by the media, sharpened their pitchforks and fired up their torches, complaining in their thousands. Two resignations and one suspension later, everyone’s happy. (Presumably, none more so than Andrew Sachs’ agent.)

Where Brand and Ross strayed into abusiveness, a good prank call will play on the disruption of reality and fiction. The call always has some degree of reality; it exists in the world as a social interaction between two people. In a prank call, there is an obvious imbalance: the caller and the ‘victim’ have different beliefs about the nature and content of that interaction. When an audience is involved, they are privy to both sides. They understand the true nature of the call, but also see the mistaken belief of the ‘victim’. They can enjoy the confusion, but also empathize with the response.

Without some fiction or false intentions, there is no imbalance of belief. Brand and Ross left messages as themselves – albeit excited playground versions of themselves – and Andrew Sachs heard those messages as truthful. There was nothing for Sachs to fall for, no illusion or deceit to be taken in by. Equally, there was no risk that Brand and Ross would be caught out, partly because, in leaving messages, they did not have to deal with immediate consequences and partly because there was no play on reality. Compare Marc-Antoinne Audette’s recent call to Sarah Palin, in which he posed as President Sarkozy, sang her a song (‘Du Rouges á Levres Sur Une Cochonne’ or ‘Lipstick on a Pig’) and praised political-porno Nailin’ Palin. She fell for it. We laughed and, more importantly, we learnt something about Palin.

More than the simple fact of deception, it is the reality of the response that gives the prank its aesthetic interest. The deceived ‘victim’ does not act as though, they act because or seemingly because.

The recorded media are full of such pranks: Phonejacker, Beadles’ About, Noel Edmonds’ Gotchas. In the nineties, radio shows relied on prank calls for comedy purposes. Such media can, of course, seek permission before broadcast. The ‘victim’ can be informed and their beliefs reconciled with reality, and then allow themselves to become the butt of the joke in public. In live performance, the same is not true. In order for a real response to occur, they must be unknowingly undermined in public.

During the devising process for Life at the Molecular Level, Present Attempt played with telephone calls. We liked the interplay of truth and fiction, the disparity of intention and belief, the intermingling of presence and absence and, most of all, the reality of the response at the other end of the line. We wanted to make friends with call-centre workers, over time. We wanted to play the single, lonely man struggling with ready meal instructions. We wanted more than customer care, we wanted a relationship.

However, we felt uncomfortable putting people onstage without permission. I can only assume The Special Guests had a similar reaction when making The Telephone Game, a durational performance around telephone conversations and behaviour that expanded from a section in This Much I Know (Part One). Though I didn’t see the piece, from what I can gather The Special Guests called each other, family members, friends, but stopped short of calling people unknown to them.

Is it ever ethical to put someone onstage without their knowledge, to enforce a revelation of themselves in public? Perhaps not, but I want to see it nonetheless.

Review: Red Fortress, Unicorn Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

At once admirably and hopelessly idealistic, Carl Miller’s Red Fortress pits three children of different faiths against the tyranny of the Spanish Inquisition. In dreaming of “a city where children learn no hate, a land where no one is an infidel”, Miller might as well take to the stage himself and announce that he has a dream. Nonetheless, his original children’s play tells a captivating story with wit, charm and emotion.

In 1491, Granada is the last Islamic city holding out against Queen Isabella’s pillaging Christian armies. Among its poverty-stricken residents are the raspily playful Rabia (Géhrane Strehler) and Luis (Jack Blumenau), a Jewish boy with a flair for engineering. The pair, in conjunction with bravado-filled Christian Iago (John Cockerill) and the naive bravery of children, set on an amorphous quest to save their city.

Tony Graham’s lushly atmospheric production treats its young audience without patronizing, conjuring up a delicate exoticism through suspended rugs and the sway of Tunde Jegede’s music. However, while the core plot is gripping and original, too much is crammed in around it. Ideas surrounding science and faith, religious extremism and artistic rebellion – not to mention a tightly squeezed love triangle and a stand-up set from Christopher Columbus – jostle together to overwhelm the narrative.

It’s a shame because Strehler, Blumenau and Cockerill make a marvellous trio at its heart: bickering, joking and dreaming. They play with finesse, balancing the communicative largeness needed in children’s theatre with emotional subtlety superbly.

At times, Graham’s direction is too reliant on the mystery of flying properties in and design, slowing the pace and swamping the action. With refining, defining and clarifying Red Fortress could be lively, intelligent children’s theatre. As it is, Miller’s script emerges from the meandering chaos as a wonderful novel too large for the stage.

Review: Follow, Finborough Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Like the newborn lumbered on its teenage protagonist, Follow is ill-conceived. Spurious to the point of being spoofish, Dameon Garnett’s clumsy play dithers between gritty drama and hapless comedy, but fails to be either. Indeed, it almost fails to amount to anything whatsoever.

While sixteen year-old scouser Blake (Adam Redmore) struggles to adjust to the shock of fatherhood, best friend Reece (Oliver Gilbert) is babysitting some pills for a local dealer. Needless to say, amidst an endless flow of diaper-related emergencies, the pills disappear, flushed away by Blake’s infuriated father (Paul Regan). What follows is panic, tears and, eventually, happy families.

Essentially, Garnett’s script consists of little more than a series of sleepless nights undermined by a clunky attempt to up the stakes and inject contemporary relevance. Nor is it helped by his tendency to overwrite dialogue and underwrite characters beyond all creditability.

Add to this a fiction-destroying plastic baby and, admittedly, the actors have a raw deal. However, none of the three seem comfortable onstage, reacting with the time delay of a satellite link-up. In panting and ranting throughout, Gilbert and Redmore make unspecific and unconving teenagers and Follow becomes an increasingly tiresome paint-by-numbers drama that achieves tension without ever saying much or surprising.

Review: To Be Straight With You, National Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Clashing worldviews rarely sit alongside one another in quietly grumbling contrast. Rather, they collide in messy, active and often violent opposition. In To Be Straight With You, contemporary dance-theatre company DV8 turn focus on the deep-set homophobia of strictly religious societies with an equally polemic stance that happens to be more comfortable for its liberal-minded audience. Intolerance, it shouts loudly, is utterly unacceptable. And we, the converted, must nod along unquestioningly.

Using verbatim texts and confessional recordings in conjunction with DV8’s seductive and stylish brand of movement and dance, director Lloyd Newson offers a scattergun argument constructed of individual examples. At times, when the authentic and the artistic sync up, it hits with emotive power, but too often movement and text feel disjointed – like watching a muted television with the radio playing.

With same-sex relationships illegal in eighty-five countries, seven of which employ the death penalty as punishment, DV8 have plenty of evidence at their disposal. However, they fail to shape it into a case or present a sympathetic alternative. Instead we get a stream of solos and duets, victims and perpetrators through which phrases of fire, brimstone and bloody murder recur and recur, clubbing us into flat submission. Moral indignation is the only response available.

However, when the individual segments break free of the diatribe, they become succinct and poignant. The fragile Muslim youth, caught in the blurry bubble of a skipping rope, describes coming out to his family, being cornered in an alley and stabbed by his father. The respectable Indian husband performs a joyous banghra duet with his male lover, also married. Best of all is the seated line-dance – swaying, casual and seemingly harmless – underneath an absurd Christian argument against homosexuality, based on cannibalism and conformity. Gradually, the dance swells in numbers as people subscribe to the logic.

It is no coincidence that these moments are in the hands of Ankhur Bahl and Dan Canham, both of whom are possessed of remarkable fluidity, in storytelling as in dance. Simplicity is the key to the argument and the emotions. Where To Be Straight With You gets carried away with possibilities, particular those of visual projections, it sacrifices impact for technical wizardry. Where the message is left to the words and movements of a talented performer, DV8 create something special and, more importantly, human.

As it is, To Be Straight With You is an important piece of theatre: it needs saying as much as it needs heeding, but it hasn’t the simple vitality to need watching.

Review: La Clique, London Hippodrome

Written for Culture Wars

Ignore the slightly plastic commercialism and the newly reopened Hippodrome seems an escapist paradise in the midst of economic instability. Encircled in lush red velvet and heavy with the aroma of popcorn, it has the atmosphere of a decadent elsewhere – perhaps prohibition America or Weimar Berlin – even before La Clique begins is carousel of freakish fantasies.

Filling the space, from a small circular stage, is a collection of the fabulous, the erotic and the gasp-worthy with a heavy lining of irony. Every spectacle that bursts through the velvet pays its dues to music hall, circus or burlesque traditions, while simultaneously subverting those expectations into something altogether smarter.

What a joy to see an audience turned topsy-turvy in its ogling of Ursula Martinez’s playful striptease when she coaxes a final empowering red hanky from her naked person. Or the eroticism at play in aerialist David O’Mer’s mix of the marvellous and the mundane, swinging from, over and through a bathtub in clinging jeans, like an cologne commercial brought to life. Or Captain Frodo – who has squeezed himself through a tennis racket, dislocating his shoulder in the process; who has stumbled and tumbled off the stage; who nightly throws caution and dignity to the wind – now perched on a six-foot makeshift tower of dented buckets, legs behind his head, encouraging us to follow our dreams.

For all the delightful mischief of Miss Behave’s regular interruptions, the show lacks a master of ceremonies to bring some semblance of order to the madness, especially once the novelty dwindles in the second-half. The grainy recorded sound and overpriced bar do nothing to add to the entertainment.

Nor, however, do they take too much away given the strengths of the acts parading before us, which provide a workout for the facial muscles as jaws drop and cheeks ache. There simply aren’t enough superlatives, but then, that’s the point.

Or, if you delve into the significance of Cabaret Decadense’s final piece – a gradually deconstructed puppet that boils down to the barest of essentials: three hands with fidgeting fingers – perhaps La Clique is nothing more than the crafty illusion of danger, difficulty and daring. Regardless, this is glorious, glamorous entertainment.

Playground Reactions

To witness an audience united in uproar is a thrilling and daunting experience. Individuals become a vociferous pack, reacting physically and baying as one. Feeling simultaneously immersed in, yet detached from, that collective response provides a glimpse into the sheer power of theatre as a live medium demanding a live response. It is not, however, an experience one expects from a Friday morning at The Unicorn Theatre.

Carl Miller’s Red Fortress, which plays at the children’s theatre until November 8, is a hopelessly idealistic piece that dreams of a Golden Age in which “children learn no hate and no one is an infidel”. It pits three teenagers – Rabia, a Muslim girl; Iago, a Chrisian; and Luis, a Jew – against the might of the Spanish Inquisition. Alongside their failed quest to prevent the fall of Granada, a triangle of unrequited love emerges, leading to a small act of defiance against an authoritarian regime in the form of three shared kisses.

First, Iago and Rabia lock lips, then Rabia and Luis, and finally, Luis and Iago. It’s a brave moment; though perhaps too aware of the reaction it seeks from its young audience. To an adult viewer these are quaint meetings of lips, a world away from the beached writhing of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. To children, the fleeting kisses represent a forbidden unknown – casual, charged and exploratory. Gasps and tentative wolf-whistles build to aghast catcalls and repulsion. Within seconds a restless gaggle of school children becomes a tumultuous sea of shock, bouncing in their seats like a stereo’s volume bargraph.

Their reaction undoubtedly has something to do with the taboo of sexual gratification. These are not the functional kisses expressing a mutual relationship that permeate children’s entertainment, but the culminations of lop-sided desire. As Rabia, Géhrane Strehler turns from one partner to another in a second. It is a collectively orchestrated activity, rather than the familiar exclusivity of physical relations. On one level, the children see it as a titillating test at the edges of social norms, as their own exploration through the actors onstage.

However, their primary provocation herein is the final kiss between Iago and Luis, which triggers ‘urghs’ and ‘bleurghs’ that linger on when the pair accidentally hold hands minutes later. The young audience’s shared response of genuine rejection of the act is only furthered by the vague recognition that the kiss is not solely embedded in the fiction but actually happening before their eyes, between two real men.

Of course, children make for an honest audience, unabashed at displaying boredom or delight, but a response so strongly animal from a crowd so young is shocking in a society that believes itself accepting of homosexuality. There is undoubtedly a prejudice at play in schools, which can only stem from a more latent intolerance across society.

That DV8’s verbatim exploration of homophobia, To Be Straight With You, opens at the National Theatre this week is both necessary and urgent; not as reprimand to the behaviour of its own sympathetic, liberal audience, but as a firm reminder, rooted in reality, that such attitudes exist and demand reaction, that tolerance extends further than mere passive responsibility. If we are to get that message into playgrounds, surely the exposure of concrete realities must replace dreamy romanticism.

Review: A Disappearing Number, Barbican Centre

Written for Culture Wars

Watching Complicité at their best is akin to an out of body experience. Theirs is a theatre of ethereal fluidity and all-encompassing abstraction played without a single hair out of place. Hypnotic and vortex-like, you tumble into it headfirst, emerging in an audience of one where their performance and your ideas gently jostle together in hazy clarity.

Returning to the Barbican a year after its first run, A Disappearing Number retains this quality of theatrical cannabis, but in seeking loftier truths it loses sight of the concrete realities of human existence.

After an intriguing and increasingly obfuscated lecture on the nature of infinity, A Disappearing Number interweaves two fragmented narratives of relationships which have maths at their centre. As the lecture theatre’s walls disappear, leaving only the criss-cross of piping and a blackboard behind, Complicité’s stage becomes a space-time diagram charting the contemporary courtship of maths lecturer Ruth (Saski Reeves) and American-Indian businessman Al (Firdous Bamji) alongside the work of Cambridge mathematician G H Hardy and his self-taught Indian prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan during the First World War.

The beauty in all this is not so much in these narrative plots as in the concepts whizzing around them and their pitch-perfect, rhythmic realisation under Simon McBurney’s direction. Using video projections, we glide into firm locations – Hardy’s archaic study; bustling, chaotic Chennai; a ruffled hotel room – where suspended moments of history seem pristinely preserved in amber.

Yet McBurney also guides us further, into an intangible infinity of possibilities. Individual scenes, captured live on camera, form their own backdrop and linger into eternity; characters slip under a rotating blackboard into multiple versions of themselves; a single hall houses three spatially and temporally distant lectures; spoken numbers morph into overlapping, complex beat poems. All this conspires to dazzle the senses and confound perception; like a page dense with numbers it is blurred and woozy, nauseating and alluring.

What hits hardest is a sense of one’s own insignificance and the interconnectivity of everything - that the continuity of space and time link us inextricably to the past and the absent. The whole of history seems present through its absence, as if we are privy to a handful of slides in an endless collection or a few lose pages of a molten scrapbook of everything.

It is, perhaps, too rich in its design and too reliant on the awe and wonder of its concepts, but, for all its lack of emotional sway, A Disappearing Number might linger on into the future like Brook’s Mahabarata or Lepage’s Far Side of the Moon for its ambitious complexity and existential beauty.

Hardy once said that just as artists are makers of patterns, so too are mathematicians and that there is no place in the world for ugly mathematics. Complicité and McBurney have done him proud.

Review: Spyski, Lyric Hammersmith

Written for Culture Wars

With their fast-paced, physical spoofs, Peepolykus have built a reputation for sharpshooting pastiche. Regularly selected for British Council showcases, they finally hit the West End two years ago with a much-lauded Hound of the Baskervilles. However, Spyski (or The Importance of Being Honest) – a potentially lethal concoction of espionage thriller and Oscar Wilde – has the hit ratio of an anonymous henchman.

During rehearsals for The Importance of Being Earnest, lead actor John Nicholson (John Nicholson) finds himself laid down with gastric flu and caught up in international intelligence operations. Passed a globe-trotting mission by a poisoned Russian agent (Javier Marzan), Nicholson must save the midlands from coerced compliance, get the girl and fend off an array of enemies by rescuing a genetically modified infant.

Spyski’s trick is that all this is covertly retold on the Lyric stage under the guise of Wilde’s comedy. Opening with Worthing and Algeron’s first exchange (played with a keen eye for stilted coattail-swishing amateurism), the play is interrupted by the blurting radio of an undercover MI5 operative whose noisy retreat gives space for the actors’ clandestine revolution.

However, this promising device is both underused and overplayed: instead of complicating the actors’ task with intrusion and confusion, it is relegated to framing a limp lampoon. The collision is left to the incongruity of set and action, as Russian oligarchs appear through French windows and palm trees appear in the parlour. Without Wilde, Spyski reduces to an easy target treated with an overdose of zaniness. Far too much is at the level of speedy costume changes and signposted gags, throwing up momentary guffaws rather than an escalating tumble of comedy.

Javier Marzan provides most of the laughs, exhibiting a destabilizing, dark playfulness almost entirely lacking in the polite comedy of his very British counterparts – only Richard Katz approaches it elsewhere in a show-stopping turn as a Chinese gangster as a slurred stereotype. Other than a brief caricature of a Katie Mitchell onstage film and the notion of Ronny Corbett golfing with the Bronski Beat, Spyski more closely resembles slack pantomime than slick parody.

Review: Broken Space Season, Bush Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Snaking its way up the stairs at the Bush is a timeline of decay, detailing the theatre’s journey into darkness as flood damage escalated. Far from closing shop, the theatre has gone dark by commissioning a series of short plays to be performed without theatre lights. However, the resultant Broken Space Season is a muted response to an emboldened battle cry.

What really comes to the fore here is atmosphere. More than simply broken, the space is a wilderness of peeling paint and exposed wires. Yet there is a magic within: from shelves overhead, a hoard of desk lights peer down on us like nymphs. The air crackles and tickles as the real intermingles with the fictions presented therein, various giving the event shades of site-specific work, happening and immersive experience. It feels quietly underground, at once illicit and tacit.

Each night showcases two plays – responses to the growing darkness of night – around Declan Feenan’s constant centrepiece St Petersburg. Beginning with one of three monologues, accumulated under the title Falling Light, the evening ends with a play presented in pitch black from the collection What The Dark Feels Like. However, despite the presence of talented writers – Neil LaBute, Simon Stephens and Lucy Kirkwood among others – one can’t help but wonder how much further it might reach in the hands of, say, Punchdrunk or Sound and Fury.

In St Petersburg the deterioration of the theatre becomes that of an old man’s living room, neglected through his own physical decomposition. As a cartoon blares away in the midst of the dust, John (Geoffrey Hutchings) tries to rally his silent grandson before in turn being cajoled by his daughter (Mairead McKinley). While the atmosphere created – creaking and heavy with the scent of burnt bacon fat – is strong, the text itself is subsumed. Feenan paints such a bleakly realistic picture that mundanity and absence overtake events as John rasps his way towards a passive expiration.

Equally ensconced in the pitfalls of the past is Simon Stephen’s monologue Sea Wall. Spiralling haphazardly around a child’s death on a family holiday, Andrew Scott addresses us directly with the stumbling hesitation of lingering pain. Stephen’s exploration of memory, whereby athlete’s foot cream remains as vivid as a daughter’s blood, is touchingly truthful. However, his reliance on a story recounted with shambolic honesty requires almost too much of its audience, as words drift into disappearance and conjured mental images fade.

Where Stephens relies on the reality of the space, Anthony Weigh places us graveside, with peat underfoot, in his eerily comic ghost story, The Flooded Grave. John Ramm, all bucolic turmoil, tells a tale of a very everyday exorcism, in which the mundane and the mystical coalesce. In the near darkness we can finally find ourselves transported elsewhere, cast as curious local sceptics, we look on at Ramm through torchlight, a railing madman in the throngs of grief. Wiegh’s script is both sharp and poignant, while Josie Rourke’s simple direction creates a questioning tingle of uncertainty down the spine.

As with those before it, The Flooded Grave is an exciting experience but leaves little to linger long in the memory. The Broken Space Season is a triumph of atmosphere over action in which the space itself emerges as star, lacking in electricity but always brimming with charge.
Till 25 October 2008

Review: Cradle Me, Finborough Theatre

Written for The Stage

After a brief foray into the city with his last play Turf, Simon Vinnicombe has retreated to the suburbs for Cradle Me, circling the voguish prey of a bourgeois family in freefall behind a well-groomed exterior.

Following the death of her teenage son, Marion (Sharon Maughan) succumbs to an affair with his reclusive best-friend Daniel (Luke Treadaway). As her husband seeks solace in champagne, Marion finds it in her admiration of youth: the pert flesh, the posters splashed on walls and the gentle bounce of reggae. In turn Daniel becomes ill-fitting adult, eventually confronted at a dinner party cum crisis summit.

Vinnicombe’s script is too easy in the watching, lacking a real sting in the tail. Solid without sparkling, it captures the wandering inanity of youthful conversation with more subtlety than the clunky life-lectures of his adult characters.

Treadaway gives a wonderfully animalistic performance, mixing squirming uncertainty with chest-puffed confidence. The weathered Paul Herzberg is perfect as the father, swinging and swigging forlornly, while Sarah Bedi adds humour and sensibility through her muddled adolescent.

Casting us as prying neighbours in traverse, director Duncan Macmillan finds a voyeuristic responsibility, ensnaring his audience through simple sexuality and the watchable crumble of a family already in despair.

Though well-observed and engaging, Cradle Me never shatters familiar territory: it’s That Face with blemishes instead of scars.

Review: Perô, Unicorn Theatre

Written for Culture Wars

Ask a British actor about their first experience of theatre and expect tales of wide-eyed wonder and pantomime dames. Given such formulaic frivolity, how refreshing to find children’s theatre so freeform, so sumptuously continental as Speeltheater’s Perô or the Mysteries of the Night at the Unicorn Theatre.

Based in Holland, Speeltheater (literally Theatre Game) have been making children’s theatre for over 30 years, colliding puppetry, music and dance in playful performance. No surprise, then, that Perô, Guus Ponsioen’s charming adaptation of Michel Tournier’s Pierrot ou Les Secrets de la Nuit, is a skilful balance of delicate storytelling and broad tomfoolery.

Using doll-like puppets, two performers (Inez de Bruijn and Tim Velraeds) enact a commedia dell’arte love triangle between baker Perô, his sweetheart Columbina and the lusty Paletino. It is essentially a touching, dainty fable about the attraction of opposites. Living in identical neighbouring houses, flour-coated Perô and spotless Columbina lead opposite lives of whiteness – he bakes nocturnally, she washes clothes by day. The explosion of noise and colour that arrives with Paletino the painter is enough to entrance Columbina. Their whirlwind marriage and elopement is enough to break Perô’s heart forcing him to close up shop due to lovesickness.

As the story is so quaintly predictable and its puppets more demonstrative than emotive, we do not find ourselves caught up in its narrative. Instead we are whisked into the world of the performance itself, played out with fervour and playground flirtation between the gently ghoulish de Bruijn and Velraeds, as they side with characters and vie for our attention.

Most enchanting, however, is the rich totality of the design. Two gorgeous dolls’ houses, outlined with a softly macabre Tim Burton quality, contain an array of tiny surprises, from working washing machines to chimneys spilling wisps of smoke upwards. Nor are Speeltheater afraid to take on large-scale theatricality: an entire fold-out countryside transforms through the seasons until Columbina, returning to Perô, finally succumbs to a snowy wilderness.

There are hints of classical epic theatre at play here as well, with Annemarie Haas and a delightfully melancholic Ponsioen overseeing proceedings as the celestial bodies, offering up an opulent musical score making Perô as pleasing on the ear as the eye.

With its warmth and passion, Perô is the theatrical equivalent of a sun-soaked, gelato-filled Mediterranean family holiday.

Review: Unfinished Realities, Hannah Barry Gallery

Written for Culture Wars

Welsh-German collaborators Awst & Walther are clearly concerned for humanity. Unfinished Realities, their first solo-exhibition in London, is an exploration of potential and consequences. Setting the material in conflict with the human, it presents oppositional reactions towards our role in the world, at once celebrating and berating our impulse of exploration and enquiry. Combining installation and performance, it is a densely complex work that struggles to fully engage its audience.

On entering the sparse warehouse of the Hannah Barry gallery one is confronted by Temptation: an apple and a grenade on a single plinth, both glistering in gold. Seductive and celebratory, the one seems the culmination of the other, mapping out the history of human sin. Inside, a bell made of ice is illuminated, weighty and perilous, above a heavy-set ashtray-like vessel collecting its drips. Dramatic in its beauty, I’ll Be Your Mirror, stands as warning and accusation about our gradual destruction of the world.

Nothing, however, is merely as it seems. Each piece holds unnoticed potential that only becomes apparent once Awst & Walther interact with their works. The apple and grenade of Temptation are gold-plated plaster. The dark-grey basin – like the barrier over which we have stepped – is not the solid we expect, but rather a semi-fluid wobble of gelatine.

Over ninety minutes, the pair carve up a bisected rectangle with bell and basin acting as centre circle. Walther scrawls white chalky lines with the plaster grenade; Awst plucks feathers from her dress with which to mark her space. Using rods of frosted glass as tools, they tap, bang and prod at the ice and gelatine, testing – and slowly breaking – its limits. By turns, the artists resemble primitive beings, methodological scientists and the nymphs of the Narcissus myth.

The attraction here is in the process: from the sides, we will their destruction on. The final mess of unctuous matter – chaotic and irrevocably spoilt – is a hollow reward for which we are equally culpable.

Unfinished Realities is the sort of work that begs the question of being pretentious. While it is packed with enough conflicting substance to avoid the term, its minimalist and achingly slow style makes for a frustrating experience. The pair enact their demolition with ponderous deliberation and protracted curiosity, forgetting about the audience along the way; the diminishing numbers testifying to the long stretches of boredom.

While, by the end, they have hit their target, the event could do with shortening, tightening and defining. The rules by which they play are always unclear and their actions are dragged from neatly ritualistic to unduly repetitive.

Awst and Walther are clearly promising artists, but Unfinished Realities is too sluggishly self-indulgent to convert its strong vocabulary and firm message into something spectacular.